


Another One Bites the Dust

by diefiend



Series: Queen [5]
Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Gen, Golgotha
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-02
Updated: 2015-09-02
Packaged: 2018-04-18 14:29:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4709387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/diefiend/pseuds/diefiend
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Crowley and Aziraphale and the Crucifixion.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Another One Bites the Dust

**Author's Note:**

> At little indulgent. And a little junky.

Aziraphale stayed to the very end, watching them pull the nails out of the hands and feet, taking off the crown of thorns with reverence and love enough that it moved him. The body almost fell to the ground several times, but Aziraphale wouldn’t help. He wanted to—of course he did—but that wasn’t his task. Watch, they said. Observe. And don’t forget to bring him back three days later, Aziraphale, it must be three days, because after that, the rot can really set in and we don’t want the Redeemer coming back a corpse, understand? 

He did, but he didn’t. But he would do as he was told, regardless of if he liked it or not—and whether or not he could like it or not was a matter of free will, and hadn’t his kind been made without? It is what separated the ethereal and the physical, the spiritual from the bodily. Despite this, of course (despite this so many times, over the years), Aziraphale felt a deep and long crack in him, endless to his core, watching them wrap up the body and take it away. He lingered and went beneath the cross, stirring the dried blood with his sandal. The sun set blood red behind him, and when he looked upwards all he saw was the green of twilight and a single, piercing star. 

He took a sharp breath and turned. Crawly was there, cautiously making his way uphill. Aziraphale saw a flask in his hand and a strange look in his eyes. 

“Angel,” he said when he reached the top.

“Demon.” Aziraphale said. 

Crawly only nodded, but he didn’t come any closer. He looked up at the cross, eyes wide and calculating. He took the cork off his flask, tipped it, and took a drink.

Aziraphale scoffed. “Shouldn’t you be a little more careful?” 

“I’m fine. He’s not here anymore.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Crawly shrugged, but he didn’t tip his flask again. 

They stayed well past sunset, both of them staring at the crucifix and the dribbles of blood on the wood. A wind blew a clot of bloody hair passed them, but neither of them moved. Fixed immobile at this momentous occasion. Fixed, and feel the world shift beneath their feet. 

Finally Aziraphale left. Crawly followed him.

The angel sighed; the demon wanted to talk, probably, and since he had been drinking he would not likely stop until satisfied. He was sure their tentative ‘agreement’—the one he was still getting used to—did not have a metaphysical discussion clause, or one about the finer interpretations of the Divine Word; yet whenever he drank Crawly seemed intent to make it so. Mostly, Aziraphale just humoured him.

When they left, Crawly stayed a handful of paces behind. Now, in the thick of the streets, Crawly sidled right up beside him, matching him stride for stride and sipping from his flask. They wandered until coming unto Crawly’s doorstop. 

The demon went to his door, and Aziraphale congratulated himself on the subtlety and execution of his plan. He stopped dead in his tracks, however, when Crawly turned and and faced him.

A taunt fury had set itself into the demon’s face. It made the dark darker, and the angles sharper, and his eyes blazed in a way that Aziraphale had only seen one other time. The door frame around him kept moving—getting wider, and then smaller again, and wider, and smaller, like breathing. There were small eddies in the dust at his feet, making tiny cyclones around his ankles. His hair waved and rippled like he was underwater, and his mouth was turned down into a snarl, full of sharp and long teeth.

“Why did He do it?”

Aziraphale blinked. “I beg your pardon—”

“What iss the point of thisss?” Crawly asked.

Aziraphale kept looking around his face—the long and thin knives of teeth like a snake, the texture of his skin rippling into scales. There was a hardness, and a blankness he had never seen before; a kind of sullen and petulant confusion coloring a storm of fury.

There was a moment where Aziraphale almost didn’t tell him. And it would have been the right thing to do, of course. Crawly was the Enemy. He’d rejected the Creator, he was Fallen, he didn’t need to know. It wasn’t any of his business, he was only there to get in the way, to corrupt—

“I don’t know.”

Crawly’s sneering face froze. The straight set went out of his shoulders. Something in his eyes told Aziraphale he was hurt, and Aziraphale was pole-axed at the realization of it, that Crawly...

But it was over in a moment. The demon shook out his longer hair, grinned around the mouth of the bottle as he took a drink. “That makes the two of us.”

He turned into his door and went through. Aziraphale, assuming the conversation over (and in his mind, it was) started walking again, away from the demon towards his home and his scrolls, where things made sense.

Crowley’s voice broke the night, stopping Aziraphale in his tracks.

“But why don’t you know?”

The question followed him all the way home, and into the night. His scrolls couldn’t keep his attention, and his chair seemed entirely too lumpy, uncomfortable. He wondered how he ever could stand it before.

Of course, it wasn’t his place to question the workings of his God; nor was it necessary for him to understand them. 

In the end, it wasn’t Crowley’s question that followed him the rest of the days, and weeks, months, and years to come; it was the empty pain, and the helplessness in his yellow eyes.


End file.
